


interim leadership

by arbitrarily



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon-Typical Content, Drug Use, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Post-Season/Series 02, Roman-Typical Dialogue, Sibling Rivalry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:21:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23206900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: He goes against the advice of counsel, his therapist’s guidance, and his own rusty, ill-used conscience. He meets Roman for lunch.
Relationships: Kendall Roy & Roman "Romulus" Roy
Comments: 4
Kudos: 78
Collections: All The Nice Things Flash Exchange 2020





	interim leadership

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LearnedFoot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LearnedFoot/gifts).



He goes against the advice of counsel, his therapist’s guidance, and his own rusty, ill-used conscience. He meets Roman for lunch. 

In the last month, Kendall’s world has limited itself to a battalion of lawyers, and Greg. He’s spoken to Chris Cuomo in prime-time more than his own family. Shiv only texts him late at night, angry and bitter-tongued, and he ignores each message, uncertain which of them he is exactly doing a favor. Stewy's called him only the once, the night after the press conference, incredulous and delighted in equal turn. And that was it. Logan had gone radio silent, no doubt on Gerri’s word, and Roman had, curiously, followed suit. Until now. 

He glances past the hostess when he enters the restaurant. The chill of the Midtown New York street rushes at his back as the door shuts behind him. He let Roman pick the restaurant. He surprised him by running in the direction opposite of a usual Roman Roy play: his choice is obnoxious if only in the sense that it’s the exact kind of place their father would select. Red leather booths line the dark wood paneled walls, old New York, old wealth, old-fashioned and out-dated. Gleaming cutlery, low lighting. Sharp knives. Sharper booze. Meat. 

Kendall ducks into the restroom—a hand held up to the hostess without further word—and takes a deep breath. He does a quick line off the back of his hand. Only one. That’s restraint, and if he pretends hard enough he can even twist it into something like sobriety. He tries not to do that, even if the impulse is reflexive and natural. He tries really fucking hard not to do shit like that anymore. After the press conference, when he was herded by Jess along with Greg down into the cement depths of the garage, he made a quiet promise to himself. No more lies. He would live in the truth, regardless of what the consequences might be.

Of course that was a lie. But it was a well-meant one, and Kendall wants to believe that maybe intentions have just as much, if not more, meaning than consequences. He checks his reflection in the mirror, wipes at his nose quickly. Dusts the wet sleet that has melted onto his shoulders off. Tells himself he’s ready, both a truth and a lie.

He lets himself be led by the hostess. She takes him to the center of the restaurant, a big round table. Set for a dozen men, rather than just the two of them. Roman wants to be seen. Kendall lets a quiet grin, more genuine than smirk, crest over his face as he glances down at the menu. As he waits for his brother to arrive. 

Roman makes him wait twenty minutes. 

“Well, well, well, if it’s not the dildo who cried wolf.” Kendall snorts. Whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean.

“Hey, Rome. You’re late.” Roman ignores him.

It’s a relief, like something loosening in him, to see that Roman looks good. Put-together, well-rested. Beaming. Kendall knows what their father can do to a person. He knows it intimately, and so does Roman. But it’s different, different when he has drawn you up close to him and his legacy, positioned you on deck, the expectations that much more colossal and failure scaled equally steep. He saw what it did to Shiv. For now, Roman appears untouched by it. In fact, he might even be blossoming under both the scrutiny and the pressure. The attention. The thought snags at Kendall—Roman is getting now what he always wanted. 

Roman takes a seat opposite Kendall, a comically wide expanse of table stretched between them. 

Roman gestures towards Kendall across the divide. “I like this look you got going on here. No more sad boy, with his thumb up his ass. Crying over his tiny dick. Nice.”

“Thanks. Much appreciated.” Roman does nothing more. He looks at Kendall expectantly. It’s borderline impressive he’s not still running his mouth. That he might actually be learning at the foot of Logan Roy after all. “How’s the old man?”

“What? With the knife you left in his back? Et tu, Kenny?” Roman scoffs. "Like you give a steaming shit.” He takes a long sip from his water glass before settling back in his chair. “He’s great. Healthier than you, probably. Definitely. Nothing’s ever gonna bring the old ox down. You might wanna, y’know, take note of that. Plan your next coup accordingly.”

“There won’t be a next one.” _There won’t need to be another,_ he doesn’t say. Before Roman can say more, the waiter steps to their table. After one quick glance of indecision between the two Roys, he approaches Roman.

“Are you ready to order, sir?”

“Yeah, man,” Kendall calls down from his end of the table. He was raised on petty power games—how best to twist the knife, not necessarily to draw blood but tears. How shame is the most precise and humbling of any weapon. How the worst thing you can ever do is leave anyone with the impression that in any room you aren’t the one to hold the highest rank. He shoves his menu forward and it skids over the tabletop to rest at the center. “I’ll have the Cobb salad. Rome?”

Roman scowls for a solid beat before his mouth cracks into a rotten jack o’lantern grin. “What kind of pussy order is that? Don’t tell me. Watching the ol’ figure? Is that it? No more coke for you now, gotta stick to lettuce and vinegar?” Kendall bites down on the urge to smile, less self-deprecation and more game recognizing game, the adolescent familiarity of it. Roman is never more like their father than when he tries to find a helplessly petty weak spot to press. A bruise to lean into and discolor that much more. He knows; there’s a bit of Logan Roy in each of his children. But with time and distance Kendall has come to see it’s only the bad that filtered down to his progeny. Con’s dilettante hunger for absolute power; Roman’s childish bullying, the faux-masculine posturing; Shiv’s cold ruthlessness, her callousness that just barely hides the insecurity festering beneath. He doesn’t like to think about what he took from Logan, but he knows—that’s the inherent problem for their father. His children took from him; he did not give.

“You wanna order for me? Is that it?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I do. I’m chivalrous as fuck.” Roman hands the menu to the waiter, the heavy leather-bound book waved carelessly, wielded weapon-like and blindly, over his shoulder. “We’ll both have the steak, rare.”

Kendall watches the departing waiter and then turns his attention back to Roman. Roman huffs an impatient sigh.

“Alright, enough with the foreplay. Who’s fucking who here, huh? Who’s gotta lube up?”

“Jesus,” Kendall mutters. Kendall adjusts his posture in his seat, pulls at his suit jacket. “You invited me, man.”

“Yeah. Maybe I just wanted to see if the old mangy dog had learned any new tricks. Like how to obey a command.” There’s an edge to Roman’s voice now Kendall’s never liked. “Good boy.”

“Roman—”

“Wanna try to play dead for your next trick? I wanna see that.”

“Look, man, I got shit to do. If you invited me here just to fuck with me—”

“Oh, you got shit to do?” Roman mocks, his voice dropped lower in what Kendall guesses is meant to be an approximation of his own. “Boo-hoo, you’re always such a whiny thin-skinned bitch.” 

“Yeah. That’s me. What the fuck do you want, Rome?”

Roman takes a deep breath, as if trying to marshal that similar energy he entered the restaurant with: restraint, power, success. “It’s not within my power, grand and sweeping as it currently might be, to offer you a cessation of hostilities. If that was what you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t. I’m not interested in a truce.”

“Yeah, no, only treason for you, buddy.”

It’s always strange when you hear someone else’s words parroted out of another mouth. Like deja vu. A bad high. “If you'd told me to fuck off just now, I’d say you sound just like Dad.”

“Fuck off.”

Kendall’s eyes narrow, lines creasing at the corners, as his lips press together, flat but not unkind. “You almost got it.”

They’re both flanked on either side by their arriving lunch. Their meals are placed on the table with the same care and precision exercised by an operating transplant team. “Yummy, yummy,” Roman says, shit-eating and annoying as anything. Kendall is silent until the waitstaff leaves them. He cuts into his steak, and the blade sinks through easily.

Kendall decides to play a hunch. His knife scrapes against the plate. “You missed me that much, huh? Is that why you called?”

Roman chews loudly, deliberately grotesque. “Maybe I just wanted to rub your face in my shit. It’s gold-plated now, smells like a fucking rose.”

Kendall ducks his head so Roman can’t see him grinning. Roman’s still so easy to wind up; he’s tempted to push harder. Obliterate any of the diplomacy he might’ve been forced to learn for his new role. The old Roman is still clearly intact—he still speaks like a bootleg Mad Libs comprised solely of obscenities. 

Kendall sets down his fork. “So. Tell me. Is it everything you wanted? Is it what you thought it would be?”

Roman stills. He never does that. He’s constantly a menace in motion, slouching and fidgeting, worse even than Kendall at his amphetamine peak. “What? The view from the tippy-tippy-top?”

“His regard.” Kendall wipes his mouth with the edge of the white cloth napkin. It comes away pink from the steak. “Dad. He’s all yours now.”

Roman still hasn’t moved. Finally, he lurches, like corroded machinery come uncertainly to life. “Yeah, man. It’s fucking tight as hell. I love every beautiful daddy and me moment I was a good enough little boy to earn.” He snorts. “Fuck you.” His face goes curiously slack then, like something Kendall’s own face would do. An intermission in the performance, an energy cut. Something genuine finding its way to the surface. “Why don’t you tell me. When you got everything you wanted, how the fuck did that make you feel?”

_Nauseous_ , is the first word that springs to mind. Sick. Scared. _I’ve never had everything I wanted_ , there’s that. _I’ve never once had a single fucking thing I wanted_. There’s that, too. 

“A man’s not supposed to get what he wants. Not everything.” Frank told him that once, long ago, back before Kendall was unceremoniously shipped off to Shanghai and Frank was installed as Roman’s own failure of a Jiminy Cricket. “A man climbs up a mountain, he reaches the peak. And what does he see? A taller mountain, there, out in the distance. Waiting for him. And so he keeps going, because, of course, he wants that, too. That’s how it works. You never get to stop. You never get everything.” He wonders if Frank still feels that way, thinks he must. He came back to Dad after all. 

So Kendall doesn’t tell Roman the truth. A lie; the intentions good. He knows a separate truth he also will not say out loud: Roman has always needed reassurance. A guiding hand. He needs someone to tell him not only the path to travel but that he walks it well. Kendall should know. They’re not so different in that regard. 

Kendall abruptly gets to his feet, his steak mostly untouched. “You’re gonna be fine.” He drops the napkin down onto the table. “Fuck, maybe you might even be great.”

A light flush has risen over Roman’s face. He looks both hurt and angry all at once, just as he did as a child at the slightest offense. Same as Shiv, when you tell her something unwanted and true. They’re more alike than they think, all of Logan’s children. 

“Get the fuck out of here,” Roman says, but there’s no heat to it. Instead, it’s like he’s issuing a parting term of endearment instead. “I’m trying to eat.”

“Yeah, okay,” Kendall says, just as warm. His mouth tips up into a smile. “Fuck you, too.”

He turns to leave. “Hey!” Roman calls from behind him. Kendall looks back, over his shoulder. Regards him, Roman seated alone at that gigantic fucking table. Knife in hand, mouth full of half-chewed food. “You’re gonna leave me with the check, motherfucker?”

Kendall’s smile grows. “It’s your turn to pay.”


End file.
